Arthur Smith Woodward

Woodward, Arthur Smith

Born May 23, 1864, in Macklesfield; died Sept. 2, 1944, in Haywards Heath. English paleontologist, member of the London Royal Society (1901). Assistant, later curator, of the department of geology of the British Museum (1882-1924).

Woodward’s basic research dealt with fossil fish, mainly of the Mesozoic era. In 1913 he described the remains of the fossil Piltdown man.

WORKS

The Fossil Fishes of the English Chalk. London, 1902-12.The Wealden and Purbek Fishes. London, 1915-17.Catalogue of the Fossil Fishes in the British Museum, vols. 1-4. London, 1889-1901.

The Piltdown Man scandal is said to be the greatest scientific fraud in the UK, with fake fossils from Piltdown being claimed as evidence of humans' earliest ancestor between 1912 and 1914 by museum palaeontologist Arthur Smith Woodward and amateur antiquarian Charles Dawson.

At the same meeting, Arthur Smith Woodward, curator of the geological department at the British Museum, announced that a reconstruction of the fragments had been prepared, and that a resulting "human-like" skull, thought to be some 600,000 years old, was all but indistinguishable from that of a modern chimpanzee.

Even Arthur Smith Woodward, Dawson's champion at the British Muse um, allowed he had "a restless mind.

According to the theory, Hinton planted a number of specially stained human and orangutan remains in a gravel pit in Piltdown to discredit his boss, Arthur Smith Woodward, who ran the paleontology department at the Natural History Museum in London.

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